I Really Live Here?

I’ve been living in this apartment for only a week and already a woman is getting murdered across the street.

Or maybe she’s getting robbed, I can’t really tell. I tried to peek outside but couldn’t see anything (there are 2 streetlights on the entire street)

Should I call for help?

But what if I was imagining it? How embarrassing if the cops show up all the way here and there was nothing. I'll wait a little more and see if she screams again.

What if that was you, Grishma, what would you want someone to do? Would you want someone to wait for you to scream again?

The screaming stopped. She’s dead. She died. She might have lived had I called the police in time but now someone’s dead because I couldn’t call for help in time. I will live with this for the rest of my life. Grishma Singh, unhelpful coward.

I crawl onto to the pile of clothes I’ve been calling a mattress lately. My laptop sits on top of a cardboard box my dad used to mail me contact lenses. I open up my laptop and, for comfort (or maybe a night time routine at this point) watch one of the vlogs waiting on queue.

The blogger is staying at a treehouse for the first time, and I hear the same scream. She grew up in rural England, and while her boyfriend was freaking out, she calmly said, “Oh, it’s just a fox! For people who haven’t heard foxes before it can be very startling.”

Ooooh.

When I moved to San Francisco, no part of me could have guessed I’d live in a national park. My back yard is a forest and my front yard is a beach. It’s a nude beach, but we’ll get into that later. There are lots of foxes around at night, and now I know what they sound like.

They sound like screaming, terrified women.

Across the street this morning.